1pm,
April 19, 2012 Room 204 Falvey Library, Villanova University

Everyone (not literally) knows Einstein was the father of general relativity, our current
best theory of gravity and of the universe on large scales, but it was a pair of
Italian mathematicians who played a crucial role in making it possible. The
geometry of the cavatappi pasta surface thus seems a fitting metaphor for how
curved spacetime makes particles move and the importance of symmetry in studying
solutions of the equations which govern their motion, both of which are
also key in the mathematical cosmology made possible by the geometry explored by
another Italian mathematician. These ideas capture a bit of the flavor of my
more than three decades of USA-Italy academic commuting. [Talk for a nonscience
audience.]

Scroll down to the bottom of
the page for the You Tube talk video and accompanying webpage files!

ACS credit?? PLEASE DO NOT COME if you are not truly interested in mathematics.
ACS credit kept me out of
Noam Chomsky's Peace Award Talk (2002) because hundreds of students who had no clue
who he was showed up for credit before we arrived delayed by unexpected crazy traffic on
Lancaster Ave!!!!!!!!!

one cavatappo

3 geodesic (autoparallel) curves on the cavatappo surface

*
Formerly Guglielmo Marconi Institute, now Building, joined by the Enrico Fermi
Building
(father of wireless radio transmission, father of controlled
nuclear fission)

Talk files:

Part 1:
Intro and Historical Backgroundgr-cosmology-italy.mw [Talk starts here: continuation of
this web page, historical overview] [HTML version]<<<<<<<
This is important link 2!

Part 2:
Geodesics as Autoparallel Curves: In Space and in Spacetimegeodesics.mw [21 MB! the mathematics, via cute
graphics][HTML
version] <<<<<<< This is important link
3!

The You Tube video only records dr bob and not the screen, which
you can sort of follow along in the HTML version, not the best solution, but
better than no video at all.
The Maple worksheets (.mw files) require the Maple
program to view, but one can then interact with the graphics, rotating the 3d
images and zooming in on them at will as bob did during
the talk.
The HTML output uses frames, so you click on the left frame margin on the links
in the table of contents to advance your way through the document, after
scrolling through each web page.